In listing podcasts I listen to, I mentioned one of his books and I have listened to this one as well. I am not that confident in my ability to rate quality literature so I am hesitant to promote the book too much but his ability to reach #1 was due to careful planning.

He had been turned down by major publisher after major publisher after publisher after minor publisher.... and decided to make his books available online in audio form. After he had more than 10,000 downloads, publishers decided the book might sell after all.

Over the last two months, Sigler promoted his book on many podcasts and asked listeners to wait until the day the book was available and buy it en-mass at 9:00am -um, US East Coast time (I've forgotten the name of the timezone). He even gave away a PDF of the text -slightly different from the audio - with the understanding that e-Books haven't really caught on, no-one would print out the book because reading on loose-leaf A4 isn't that exciting either, so readers would just be more interested in buying the hard-copy (but softcover) book. Loyal listeners did buy on April 1; Australians even waited until 2:00am their time to synchronize their purchases.

I enjoyed Ancestor, but not enough to buy it, even though I feel a kind of connectedness to the author, having listened to him read for the past year.

I wonder if any of my readers do give money for services online. I'm talking about free services with a 'donate here' button, not pay services like Amazon. I listen to PodioBooks and Escape Pod and use Juice to download their content and have never donated; am I a bad man?

Now, on to cooking advice.

Charles at Liminality, has a mouth watering post about making Calzones. He makes the cooking process seem so easy that I may try it soon. Still, I've seen photos of him. He's pretty slim. Can one really trust cooking advice from a thin person?

1 comment:

Hey, so you didn't like it enough to spend $ on it, and that's the point. That's why I give it away - if it trips your trigger, you connect, you might buy. If it doesn't, you take it for what it's worth, and move on.